The present invention generally relates to an office information system, and in particular to an office information system suitable for visualization and control of information circulation when office workers mutually exchange electronic mail messages by using a decentralized information system having a plurality of work stations connected via a network.
As cost and weight of personal computers and word processors are reduced, a large number of office workers have come to edit documents and spread sheets (hereafter collectively referred to as office automation (OA) objects) by using computers. Heretofore, software systems for processing these office automation (OA) objects have provided functions of aiding personal work in a closed system. However, it is hard to say that software systems have supported cooperative work by a plurality of workers as a group or groups.
Electronic mail services are included in the rudiments of cooperative work. As for the electronic mail, OFIS/MAIL-EV (manual No. 2050-3-061) of Hitachi, Ltd. and techniques which will be described later are known. They have functions such as carbon copy mail, express mail and confidential mail. In addition, they have a function of mailing to a remote location via a plurality of computers. These electronic mailing systems have automated conventional postal service of offices and achieved speeding-up of information exchange.
In JP-A-60-134371 of the present inventors, there is disclosed an information storage and utilization method of storing procedure information relating to event-driven processing procedures, retrieving the above-described procedure information upon occurrence of a certain event, and automatically executing the procedure in an event-driven manner in accordance with pertinent procedure information if the pertinent procedure information is present. A typical example of events is "mail reception", and a receiving person can define what should be done for the received mail. However, control exercised over mail by a sending person is not considered at all. A conventional technique similar to this is described in "A `Spreadsheet` for Cooperative Work" by Kum-Yew Lai et al., CSCW '88, pp. 115-124 (September 1988).
In "A Language/Action Perspective on the Design of Cooperative Work" by Terry Winograd, Morgan Kaufmann Publisher, Inc., 1988, a technique of modeling a state transition for conversation is disclosed. The modeling technique involves registration means for registering a conversation structure model including request, proposal, counterproposal, promise, and disapproval defined beforehand by a system designer and means for tracking the circulation of "conversation" by using the conversation structure model. A user is thus reminded of pending matters.
The above-described thesis makes no mention of definition of control over mail given by a sender.
In conventional electronic mail systems as exemplified above, all control determining "until when and what should be done for received mail" was basically left to the receiving person as represented by the expression "determined by receiving person after being received". Further, the sender could know "whether mail had arrived or not" and "whether the mail had been read or not". However, the sender could not know "how the mail had been processed" and "why the mail had not been processed", which were truly desired to be known, via the system. Further, the sender could not modify mail once transmitted by means of the sender's own operation. From the point of view of a receiver, the receiver must monitor reception for himself when there is mail to be necessarily received.
Conventional mail is effectively used in one way message passing. However, the functional limitation heretofore described brings about a problem of the conventional mail that OA objects mailed to request receiving persons to take action often are left unprocessed. This functional limitation is basically caused by the fact that conventional mail systems are designed by faithfully modeling the postal service of offices.
That is to say, in conventional electronic mail systems, consideration is not fully given to system support relating to visualization and control of flow of OA objects needed when a plurality of office workers cooperate with each other asynchronously, which is a feature of office work.